But with God it is different. He is the judge, yet he is always the most offended party. And he never ever recuses himself. That is all right because he is never corrupted, either. His justice remains absolutely perfect. He never makes a mistake. God is not simply administering a system of morality that is bigger than he is. When we sin against God, we are not simply sinning against the law with God as a neutral observer. That is where C. H. Dodd got it so wrong. God is the most offended party, and he is our judge! He stands over against us in wrath righteously because he is holy, and he stands over against us in love because he is that kind of God. And he sends forth his Son to be the propitiation—the one who sets aside God’s wrath—for our sins.

Jesus says that the first commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. It is the first commandment because it is the one we always break when we break anything else. Always.

It is awful. If you cheat on your income tax, the party most offended is God. If you cheat on your spouse, the party most offended is God. If you indulge in racism, the party most offended is God. If you nurture bit- terness, the party most offended is God. That is what makes sin sin, and we must be reconciled to this God. We certainly need to have horizontal relationships restored as well, but if you have the horizontal relationships restored but do not have forgiveness from God, you do not have much! In eternal terms what you must have is God looking at you favorably.

21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God ‘s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26 It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. – Rom. 3:21-26

Some of us have a view of the gospel that makes Jesus out to be something like an automobile club repairman: Jesus is a nice man, he’s a very, very nice man, and when you break down, he comes along and fixes ￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼you. Yet what Paul depicts here is that the nature of our brokenness turns first and foremost on our offensiveness to God. It is the wrath of God that is disclosed from heaven. Paul is certainly not denying that there are many kinds of social parameters to sin; he is not overlooking the raw fact that sinners can also be victims. Perpetrators have very often been the abused. Sin is a social thing. We commit sin, and we affect others. On the other hand, if we think of ourselves only in terms of victimhood, then we need only a healer or repairer. If all the damage we do is exclusively horizontal, what we need most is social transformation. Of course, the Bible can picture God and his salvation in these sorts of categories. Yet in the Bible the most fundamental category of all to which the biblical writers resort in order to portray the nature of the problem is our offensiveness before God. It follows that what is needed first and foremost for us to be saved—for this situation to change—is to provide a means by which we may be reconciled to this God.